By December 2007, following changes in Finnish legislation, Keskusrikospoliisi, the Finnish
National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), had compiled a secret
blacklist of websites that it deemed to contain child
pornography and sent it to Finnish Internet service providers.
Although the filtering is optional, Viestintäministeriö, the
Ministry of Communications, has threatened to make it mandatory
should service providers not implement it voluntarily. Nikki then
wrote a program that scanned through adult websites to
find out how the list works. By January 7, 2008, he had scanned
through 100,000 websites and wrote on lapsiporno.info that of the
785 censored sites the large majority contained in fact legal
pornography.[2]

To prove his claims, Nikki published the results of his research
on his website, including a list of the blocked addresses he found.
Analyzing the address list, Nikki also noted that the first three
Google search results for "gay porn"
are censored. Electronic Frontier Finland
(EFFI) have noticed that the blacklist includes non-pornographic
websites also, including a Windows advice forum, a computer
repair service and the Internet Initiative Japan
server nn.iij4u.or.jp that, among others, hosts websites for a violin factory, a doll store and a hearing aid manufacturer.[1][3]

Contents

Censored by the Finnish
police

On February 12, 2008, after Elisa customers could not access the website
it was found that NBI had added lapsiporno.info to their filtering
list.[4]
The police have refused to comment on which websites are censored
and why, but chief inspector Lars Henriksson of the NBI stated that
the list includes websites that contain at least one image that is
deemed child porn as well as websites that contain a link to such
site.[5][6]
The Finnish law[7]
allows the police to list sites that fulfill the two criteria of
containing child pornographic material (defined as being images
that depict children in sexual context) and that are hosted abroad.
However, lapsiporno.info is hosted in Finland and does not contain
any child pornographic material.[3]

EFFI has demanded NBI to explain why a website that only
contained articles and a list of blocked addresses was censored.
Leena Romppainen, member of the board of EFFI, stated that "if the
site really had some illegal content, wouldn't the correct solution
be to take the site down and take the site owner to the court? The
site is located on a Finnish server and the name of the site owner
appears visibly on the root page of the site." Most of the censored
websites on Nikki's list are located either in the United States or in
the European
Union, and Romppainen continued: "The local authorities have
taken no action on these sites. Therefore, either the sites do not
contain child pornography or the NBI has not informed the local
authorities. Both of the alternatives are equally scary." Tero
Tilus of EFFI stated that "some faceless official decides which
sites the Finns may not see, and this decision cannot be appealed.
Now he has apparently decided that net filtering may not be
criticised."[8][9]

Jyrki Kasvi,
member of Finnish Parliament, also questioned the
legality of censoring lapsiporno.info, noting that according to
Finnish law, only websites hosted outside Finland can be added to
the filtering list, and reminded that the Minister of Transport and
Communications, Susanna Huovinen, who lobbied for the
law, had emphasized openness and transparency.[10] EFFI
and Kasvi have also voiced concerns about attempts to expand the
Internet censorship beyond child pornography, following
propositions in the media to censor online gambling websites.[5][6]

Nikki believes that one of the reasons leading to his website
being blacklisted was a function that he added to his address list,
which simply turned a list of static text into clickable links. He states that he
had already known that the police are adding websites to the
filtering list based on this, and said that he will not remove the
link functionality, because there is nothing illegal about it.[4]
On his website, Nikki has also reminded that the Internet filtering
system was originally implemented despite University
of Turku's Faculty of Law's statement that the system would be
against the Constitution of Finland.

The content of lapsiporno.info was quickly mirrored to other
servers, and Nikki has helped this copying by releasing the website
content under the Creative Commons license CC-by-nc-sa.[11] On
February 14, computer magazine Tietokone reported on its
website that NBI's actions had caused several complaints to the Parliamentary Ombudsman as well
as to the Office of the Chancellor of
Justice.[12] Nikki
was questioned by the police, suspected of aiding in distribution
of a picture offending sexual morality.[13] These
charges were later dropped, [14] but
the site still remains censored. [15]

By February 19, a group of Finns had gone through Nikki's list
of 1047 censored websites and published their research, according
to which nine of the sites contained child pornography, nine were
unrelated to pornography, 28 had content hard to categorize as
legal or illegal, 46 were (legal) child modeling sites and 879 contained only
legal pornography.[16]

Status of lapsiporno.info with Finnish Internet service
providers

Service provider

Status

Notes

24 Online

Not censored

24 Online's CEO has stated that it is not their job to limit
their customers' use of the Internet.[17]